Back in high school I never got to carry a sack of flour around and pretend it was my baby. No formal education on how to put on a diaper (all I got was a crash course by a 5 year old as another kid lay on the bathroom floor looking poopy). Thankfully, my new sourdough starter baby doesn’t have BM’s. It is supposed to get “black” and “scummy”, but that hasn’t happened yet. Last week I had a few failed attempts to make a starter. Either there was no cloth to cover the dish with, or the dish got thrown away. No more of that. I now have one of the few precious plastic bowls from the kitchen, with a nice smooth, 1:1 concoction of water and flour inside, covered with my sarong. Hygienic or not, I don’t care. I bought that sarong at the last Hog Farm Festival in Laytonville, CA. The sarong has been a lot of things and been a whole lot of places. At least I washed it sometime ago, because now I’m making bread with it. In two days, I’m hoping to have a nice starter, from which I’ll make my bread and let it sit in the sarong for a little while before baking.

I don’t have any fancy flour. I have no idea how strong the gluten will be, what the vitamin C content is, or any of that. It came out of some paper bag. Someone said it was flour and it looked like flour. It’s very possible that this bread thing won’t work, and we won’t be able to have French toast, some awesome sandwiches, or croutons. Or whatever else one can do with bread. I was reading someplace that you shouldn’t try making a bread that is different than what the local bread is. Local bread is that way because the flour and environment can only make that type of bread. To hell with that. The local bread is crap and I don’t want to make or eat crap bread.

On a side note…since working in Pakistan and Iraq, I’ve seen a lot of business cards and resumes with email addresses on it. I’ve been surprised at how many of those email addresses end in “69”. For example, “Iraqi_Champ_69”. Does the number have a different significance around here? It’s not like I see “SuperPakistani70” or “BigButmash68” on resumes. Seriously, I think when I get back to the states I am going to have a new email address for job hunting: “Phat69.” It’ll prove that I am a diverse individual. People will immediately recognize my solidarity with my Middle Eastern and South Asian brothers.

Crap. I still need to figure out what I’m cooking tonight.

Maybe some braised eggplant, pasta with a Bolognese sauce, and garlic bread. That’ll require shopping though, which might not be allowed. There was a security report of a car packed with explosives driving around Erbil yesterday. We were locked down because of it. But we’re more or less locked down everyday. Hopefully I can go shopping. I need flour, olive oil, canned oysters, and to get out.